- December 31, 2000
- British Telecom's futurologist describes your life in 2020. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but each element in the scenario has a degree of realism to it. All big technology companies should do one of these assessments of the dark side of their ideas every now and then.
- December 24, 2000
- In 1998 I estimated that the upgrade speed of Web users was 1% per week: when new software comes out, 1% of users upgrade each week. This is half of the change rate seen in the early years of the Web. Estimates of the upgrade speed of the Flash player show exactly the same pattern for late 2000: in September 2000, 18.5% of users had Flash 5. By December 2000, this had grown to 32.1%: an increase of 13.6% over 13 weeks. Uncanny that my prediction from 1998 continues to be this accurate.
- December 19, 2000
- Macromedia has posted a list of usability guidelines for use of Flash. All very reasonable, but probably not detailed enough. We need something more like the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. They have also posted the results of a comparative usability measurement of two Flash design: one that did not follow the guidelines and a revised one that did. Improvements in measured usability:
- Time-to-task performance: 150%
- Subjective satisfaction: 66%
It is common for usability to double as a result of a redesign, so these findings do not surprise me at all. One weakness of this study is that it's not clear to what extent the original design was the best attempt of a traditional Flash designer.
- December 20, 2000
- My book Designing Web Usability was the #2 best-seller for all of 2000 on Amazon.com and #3 for the year in the U.K. in the Computers & Internet category. It was #49 best-seller of all books on Amazon.com for the year. The French translation continues to be the #1 Internet et Nouvelles Technologies best-seller on Amazon.fr.
- November 30, 2000
- Main topic among the audience comments at the User Experience World Tour in London: porting Web content to handhelds and interactive TV.
- November 30, 2000
- My WAP Usability Report was released at the World Tour event in London November 30. Conclusions:
- 70% of the users answered no when asked whether they would like
to have a WAP phone within one year;
- even the simplest tasks take much too much time to provide any
satisfaction to users;
- even after spending a week using a WAP phone, user performance
remained appallingly low;
- WAP content was frequently designed for the Web and not for the requirements of the mobile medium, further reducing usability: repurposing didn't work when putting brochureware on the Web in 1994 and it doesn't work when fielding mobile services in 2000
- November 24, 2000
- Probably the year's biggest news for the future of the Internet:
IBM starts shipping the world's first good computer monitor.
One of the biggest problems holding back the Web is the fact that it is so painful and slow to read from traditional screens. The new IBM screen is the first one to approximate the readability of paper. Xerox also had a good-quality prototype display I saw at Comdex a few years ago, but it seems to have vanished from the face of the earth. Hopefully IBM will put major marketing and manufacturing dollars behind their new screen so that they can revolutionize the way we deal with information online. So far, the news are discouraging: they only have one customer at a nuclear weapons facility. Come on, IBM, I have a big check waiting for you if you will make me your second customer.
- November 24, 2000
- David Strom reviews two Internet appliances and conclude that they are both too difficult to use. Sad. I had great hopes for this genre, but it seems that the products are being shipped without attention to quality, usability, or even a simple matter like tech writing (Strom complains bitterly about the manuals).
- November 23, 2000
- The New Economy Scotland site has an interesting analogy with film-making techniques (Dogma, Studio and Gonzo) to explain the different approaches to web design.
- November 22, 2000
- Interviews with Web professionals in New York and Chicago. The emphasis in New York was on dealing with media formats; in Chicago the emphasis was on corporate management. I will leave it to you to decide whether this says something about the two cities.
- November 12, 2000
- I am stunned: the head of WalMart.com is clued-in about what it takes to run a good e-commerce site. OK, I have met many Internet executives who do understand the Web, but almost always in new-economy firms. If there is anything I thought was old-economy, it was Wal-Mart, and their site was certainly a disgrace for a long time. However, better times seem to be ahead now that they are being run by somebody who knows the rules.
- November 10, 2000
- Ideas.com launches: notable for being one of the very few players in the C2B space (disclosure: I am on the company's advisory board).
- November 8, 2000
- Kara Pernice, senior user experience specialist in my New York office, writes about her experience voting in the recent election:
On November 7, 2000 at a poll site in New York City, a man came out of a
voting booth and told a nearby volunteer, "I voted wrong. I accidentally
voted for the wrong person for president." He was told that he could talk
to a judge about changing his vote. But for now, the vote is counted. I
could have easily made the same mistake because the voting booth is not easy
to use. And it's not something we do frequently, so we can forget how the
machine works between elections. As we know from software and consumer
product design, poor usability costs and hurts. Voting for the wrong person
is a serious symptom of poor usability, and others include long lines and
frustrated voters. It's doubtful that those who took that extra time behind
the curtain were just learning the candidate's names and making a decision.
Instead, they were probably really just trying to figure out how to vote
correctly. The little mechanical earlike levers near each candidate's name
do not say "Turn me" to me. When I did turn them, I thought "Is that it?
Did I do it?" I got no meaningful feedback. It would be nice if there were
a simple button next to each name that you could push in, and have it look
pushed in. I'll admit though, I did create problems for myself because I
just had to test whether I could turn the ear of two presidential
candidates. Afterward I was paranoid that I just voted two times.
Finding my preferred candidate's name wasn't as easy as it could have been.
The way the grid of candidates was laid out was confusing. Before I went
behind the curtain I knew who was running against whom and the people I
wanted to vote for. But when presented with the board of choices, I had to
read through the table of information a few times to tell where to vote for
the senator I wanted. Some names were listed more than once in more than
one column and I had to study it before making my selection. It would be
nice if you could just see the office the candidates are running for, then
the names and parties. Then push a button.
Once I picked the names and pulled that big metal lever to finish, it felt
very final and a bit scary. The creaking sound it made reminded me of
medieval times. And, I imagine it feels a lot like those levers in the
movies that start the conveyor belt with the good guy tied to it, heading
straight for the big whirring circular saw.
It was with mixed feelings that I cast my vote - happiness and pride about
exercising my right, uneasiness and worry that I did it wrong. I hope the
folks in Florida didn't do what the man in Manhattan did. Between recounts,
absentee ballots, and petitions with judges, we won't have a decision for a
long time.
Jakob adds: The Florida ballot clearly had usability problems, caused by the attempt to map a two-column set of labels onto a one-column action area. A direct mapping between two single-column areas would have been much less error-prone. However, I don't want to pass any judgment as to whether this usability problem cost Al Gore the Presidency because there were so many other usability problems in other states that might have influenced the count there. All we can really say is that it is obvious that the people who create voting designs don't bother much with usability.
On the bright side, I did get an email from a reader in Kentucky who says that their voting machines have pretty good usability. So it can be done.
- October 26, 2000
- An assessment of the quality of Web-based streaming audio and video scores the average of twenty big sites as 1.9 on a 1-10 rating scale. The details of the methodology are not clear from the article, so who knows how well they balanced viewing conditions and user fatigue. Or even whether the metric was actually based on human perception. But with a score like this, details don't matter. One important methodology point is clear from the article: the 1-10 rating scale was defined to make broadcast-quality video the high end of the scale. I agree with this decision, though I would have made full-DVD-quality the high end. We have got to stop making excuses for Internet-based designs and compare them to users' expectations from the real world. That's the same reason I have been insisting on a 1-second response time goal for page downloads.
- October 12, 2000
- Commentary on Apple's new mysterious user interface style. Meta-comment: it's interesting how a quite complex composite graphic turns into an appropriate media format for Web content, playing off the genre of the movie poster to allow us to understand it quickly. A single, focused message - a visual micro-column. I would have liked one or two hypertext links to provide background or extended commentary.
- October 4, 2000
- Even the Scandinavians are losing faith in WAP. The leading Danish newspaper Politiken reported Wednesday that Swedish WAP companies have lost 75% of their stock valuation this year.
- September 28, 2000
- Nice case study of how to expose product categories on a home page.
- September 23, 2000
- I was almost impressed by the new HP home page: very minimalist and easy design at first sight. But then you mouse over the clean big buttons and the arrows start spinning. Too bad. Also, useless explanatory text: the Products & Services button is explained as "Discover our wide range of products and services." Gee, I would never have guessed that. However, clicking on the button reveals an incredibly clean category page, so I do like the site.
Ben Rees adds: I found a typo on one of the product pages.
Being the supportive user that I am I attempted to mail HP's webmaster
about the error only to receive a cgi error when I submitted the feedback
form.
Perhaps HP could have used an editor and a testing team to add to their 3D
button designer! (Jakob's comment: the Omnibook page had at least four typos when I checked it Sept. 27. How many can you spot? How quickly can HP fix them after being berated in public?)
Jakob's comment: the Omnibook page had at least four typos when I checked it Sept. 27. How quickly can HP fix them after being berated in public?
Update same evening: kudos to HP - typos fixed, almost (the page still talks about the "discriming user").
- September 15, 2000
- CueCat is clueless. What more needs to be said? It violates the basic premise of any new Internet technology which is to provide more benefits than hassles to the user. The device may hypothetically provide some benefits to magazine advertisers, but they are not the ones who have to make the decision to use it. The detailed argument is nicely presented by Scott Rosenberg.
- September 4, 2000
- User Experience World Tour now open for registration (save up to $210 by registering early).
Speakers:
Jakob Nielsen, Bruce Tognazzini, Brenda Laurel, Don Norman.
USA: New York, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco, Seattle
Europe: London, Munich, Stockholm
Asia: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore
Australia: Sydney
One-day seminar in each city with all four main speakers.
Opens in New York on November 14.
The World Tour also includes two optional days of in-depth tutorials:
- Introduction to Web Usability Testing
- Advanced Usability Testing Methodology
- E-Commerce Usability
- E-Marketing for Non-Marketers
- The Art & Science of Web Design
- Content Design & Usability - Writing for the Web
- Designing Usable Web Forms
- Java User Interface Design
All by leading experts (for example, the Java day is by the project manager of Sun's official Java Look-and-Feel guidelines).
- August 31, 2000
- First time in industry history: Microsoft brags about how few features the new MSN software has. They dis AOL 5.0 as bloated with 138 confusing options. AOL has lost some of their focus on superior user experience: recent designs have been more aimed at milking eyeballs than at empowering users. One good thing about Microsoft: if an established company opens the door even slightly, MS will rush in and exploit the weakness. Let's hope that Microsoft's newfound respect for simplicity and fewer features will translate into their other software.
- August 24, 2000
- Caroline Jarrett provides this example of the importance of meaningful line breaks:
If you are forced
to use very short
line lengths, then
it's worth the effort
to make sure that
each line contains
some meaningful unit.
Much better than the following example:
If you are forced to
use very short line
lengths, then it's
worth the effort to make
sure that each line
contains some meaningful
unit.
Editors have to design content to specific character counts for any kind of small-screen device. Usability increases with better line breaks. The same principle applies to email: don't let your mail program "design" the line breaks in email newsletters and the like.
- August 20, 2000
- Futuristic Design: "Holy Shit -- Nielsen Norman Group hires Tog and Laurel." (Independent commentary on our recent announcement.) Part of the series of "Straightface" columns: very insightful perspective on the future of user interfaces.
- August 12, 2000
- Microsoft Reader is somewhat disappointing. I downloaded Moby Dick but could not keep my interest going in reading much beyond "Call me Ishmael." I continue to maintain that traditional books are ill suited for repurposing onto current computer screens. ClearType did improve readability, but not as much as I had hoped. Somebody outside Microsoft should run an independent study to see how much of the reading speed gap between paper and screen is being bridged by ClearType on a present-day flat-panel display. My guess is that ClearType speeds up reading by about 10% (note that this is an estimate, not measurement data).
A Microsoft manager is quoted as saying that ClearType will be available next year "for all Microsoft applications." The Anti-Trust folks should look into this. If ClearType is made available for Microsoft applications and not integrated fully into the operating system, then that is the final kiss of death for any independent software developers. Nobody wants to spend 10% more time reading their email, their spreadsheets, their documents - or web pages, for that. So once ClearType becomes prevalent, nobody will use any software that doesn't have it.
- August 9, 2000
- My server and sales statistics show a conversion rate of 2.2% from people looking at the page for my Web usability book to people actually buying the book. Better than many sites that sell on the Web, but not that spectacular either. Why isn't the conversion rate higher? Most likely many people buy the book through other channels - typically they will ask their company to buy it for them. As long as we cannot track such indirect sales it will be very hard to compute the true value of Web marketing.
- August 8, 2000
- Two incredibly insightful articles by Dan Bricklin:
- August 7, 2000
- A reader sent me this sad set of experiences with Web customer service or lack of same:
1. I tried to register with USAIR on their site to make reservations and
to qualify for the 5000 mile bonus for booking online. After three tries
where their site crashed my browsers (NS 4.72 and IE 5.0), I was not able
to log in due to various error messages. I called the 800# for assistance
with their site and was told my browsers were too old. I also tried to send an
email to the address given on their site and it came back as
"addressee unknown."
2. I shopped online all weekend for wrinkle free clothing. One site, Railriders.com, had
nothing on their site as to whether their clothing was wrinkle free so
I sent an email Saturday and did not receive a reply until this
morning. Too late; I already spent $600 at Travelsmith.
3. I used
Netscape to log on a to my credit union a few weeks ago for the purpose of transferring money
to my wife's checking account. I followed the instructions and got a
confirmation the transfer went through only to find out later that it
did not. Try explaining to your wife who is "computer challenged" that
you really did put money in her account.....
After calling the Credit Union I was told by the customer service
person, who was very apologetic, that I was not supposed to use Netscape, but nothing on the site said "IE only."
4. I went to a web site for daytraders to see about joining their
service; while checking out various pages some of the GIFs would not
load. I sent an email stating same and received this response back:
"Stop beating me up and check your equipment. DayTeL works on my
computer."
- July 29, 2000
- David Walker correctly notes the usability problems with pull-down menus and other non-stable menus. I particularly appreciate his analysis of three Microsoft-generated hierarchical menus: Slate, MSNBC, and the Win98 Start menu all behave differently. Hierarchical menus are a bad idea to begin with (we learned that from usability studies of the Macintosh more than 10 years ago), but at least they could be consistent.
- July 25, 2000
- AutoAuditorium System automatically produces 4-camera videos of
auditorium presentations without any human control at all. A great example of non-command user interfaces: you control the system simply by delivering your lecture the way you normally would. No camera crew. But also no GUI. I would not really believe that this would be possible at the current poor level of AI if I had not seen the system in operation, giving a talk myself in the initial installation several years ago when it was still a research prototype. This is now a product and would be a great tie-in with a multimedia-enabled intranet to allow employees in remote locations to follow presentations at the main corporate campus.
- July 23, 2000
- Advogato article revisiting the Anti-Mac paper Don Gentner and I wrote in 1996, contrasting it with recent developments in open software. While the Macintosh and Windows remain stuck in their original paradigm, independent software designers may be scratching the surface of the next paradigm. I don't think we expected the Anti-Mac to happen until maybe 2005 or so - but faster progress is definitely welcome as the old GUIs have more than outlived their usefulness. Unfortunately, I think most Linux designs are far too conservative.
- July 21, 2000
- Sun Microsystems announces Java Web Start: a simplified way to download application functionality by clicking a link on a Web page. If the software is not already resident on your computer, Java downloads it and caches it, but if you are re-running the code, it simply starts. Also, it is possible to add this network-based software to the Start menu under Windows. As much as it may irk Sun to have to fit inside Microsoft's UI standards, this is clearly the right choice: network computing will only work when integrated with the user's main platform. Just like the Palm Pilot won because it integrated with the PC whereas the Newton didn't integrate with the Mac.
Disclosure: I used to work at Sun, but I left two years ago and have since sold all my stock (bad mistake), so I don't have any special interest in promoting them any more. In the interest of full disclosure, I admit to having done a small amount of consulting for Sun recently, but for a different department.
- July 19, 2000
- Photos and report from my seminar in Oakland last week.
- July 19, 2000
- Apple announces the death of the painful iMac mouse to be replaced by an optical mouse. I just hope they ran some human factors studies this time to measure target acquisition times and fatigue resulting from 8 hours' use per day (or 12 hours in the case of Web designers :-) The new mouse will only be sold through Apple's website. Understandable that Apple wants to milk the profits from its long-suffering fans as they rush to get good mice, but it sure makes it hard to be an Apple dealer when they are denied high-margin, sure-sell products. Strategic implication: Apple is not planning a long-term future for the Mac so they don't care about the dealer network.
- July 17, 2000
- If you want to put long, academic papers online, here's how to do it: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (sample paper).
- Outline stays with you as you scroll the long page; clean layout
- Can download a PDF version for printing (never use PDF for on-screen reading)
- One-click search for other papers by same authors or other papers on the same topic
- Integrates with your "citation manager" (only an academic would have such a beast, but the general idea is good: way for users to keep track of good stuff they may need later)
- Small images in main page (so downloads fast); easy links to bigger figures and tables
- Hypertext links to as many of the literature references as possible
- July 16, 2000
- A client has sued Razorfish for bad Web design that was "flawed by grave technical and navigational problems." It is certainly true that the site (IAM.com) violates many usability rules. On the other hand, IAM should have known what they were in for when they hired a Razorfish. If you want a functional site, don't go to a glamour design shop.
Also, IAM claims that it was unfair that they were only given five days to judge the design. My dears, five minutes are enough to produce a long list of usability problems in the IAM.com design, so if you can't tell after five days that you have a bad site, I don't think you have a right to complain. Razorfish probably did what they were told to do: produce a cool site. Of course, we all know that such sites are a waste of money, but that's the client's fault. Unless IAM can prove that they ordered a site that complied with my usability principles, they probably don't have a case. Of course, one could argue that a design firm should refuse to take on a project that will lead directly to disaster for the client, but most firms deliver what the client orders, even when it's bad for them: I don't think it is unethical to follow orders as long as one has warned the client about the consequences.
See also: Fortune case study of site outsourcing gone wrong.
- July 11, 2000
- Yahoo made 0.448 cents per page view in the second quarter of 2000 (CPM $4). For some reason, no other analysts report this crucial number which is very easy to compute from the public statements of traffic and revenues. This compares with revenues of 0.447 cents in Q2 1999 and 0.480 cents in Q4 1998. It is very impressive that Yahoo has virtually constant earnings in face of the declining advertising rates on the Web at large.
- July 10, 2000
- The British telephone company Orange has bought the "virtual character" Ananova for $143 million. This is obviously an inflated price and the company will become a Bloodied Orange soon enough if they continue to base their Internet strategy on gimmicks rather than solid service (transporting bits fast and cheaply is what customers want most from a telephone company). You could create a better avatar for less than a million by hiring a few good people away from Disney Character Animation for a year.
Ananova - overpriced avatar
A deeper question is whether avatars are needed in the first place. Most people certainly seem to hate Microsoft's animated paperclip, and having a face reading the news is a legacy of traditional television that does not transfer to the interactive medium. Avatars and anthropomorphic computers are a staple of science fiction because they make for more interesting plots (who would have seen 2001 if HAL had been a menu system with a slider to control fuel flow?). Also, it is easier for the audience to understand interactions between the hero and an avatar than an "action sequence" composed of a lot of double-clicking (try to observe a usability test of an expert user and you will know what I mean). But in a UI that you actually use, avatars get in the way.
On the other hand, I put a picture of Ms. Ananova on this page and it takes a lot to make me violate my "no graphics" rule. Maybe there are some cases where an anthropomorphic interface does work: particularly ones that you don't use very often (novelty effect cool; repetition boring).
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